Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) products are widely utilized in many applications, including refrigeration, air conditioning, foam expansion, and as propellants for aerosol products including medical aerosol devices. Although HFC's have proven to be more climate friendly than the chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbon products that they replaced, it has now been discovered that they exhibit an appreciable global warming potential (GWP).
The search for more acceptable alternatives to current fluorocarbon products has led to the emergence of hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) products. Relative to their predecessors, HFOs are expected to exert less impact on the atmosphere in the form of a lesser or non-detrimental impact on the ozone layer and their much lower GWP as compared to HFC's. Advantageously, HFOs also exhibit low flammability and low toxicity.
As the environmental, and thus, economic importance of HFO's has developed, so has the demand for precursors utilized in their production. Many desirable HFO compounds, e.g., such as 2,3,3,3-tetrafluoroprop-1-ene or 1,3,3,3-tetrafluoroprop-l-ene, may typically be produced utilizing feedstocks of chlorocarbons, and in particular, chlorinated propenes, which may also find use as feedstocks for the manufacture of polyurethane blowing agents, biocides and polymers.
Unfortunately, many chlorinated propenes may have limited commercial availability, and/or may only be available at prohibitively high cost, due at least in part to the complicated, multi-step processes typically utilized in their manufacture. This may be due at least in part to the fact that conventional processes for their manufacture may require the use of starting materials that are prohibitively expensive to be economically produced by manufacturers on the large scale required to be useful as feedstocks. Although more cost effective starting materials are known, their use can result in the production of larger quantities of less desirable intermediates than conventional starting materials. And so, the cost savings initially provided may be spent dealing with the removal or disposal of these undesirable intermediates.
It would thus be desirable to provide improved processes for the production of chlorocarbon precursors useful as feedstocks in the synthesis of refrigerants and other commercial products. More particularly, such processes would provide an improvement over the current state of the art if they were less costly in starting materials, while also providing for the use of secondary products rather than requiring additional processing costs for removal of the same.